Overall, a good game has promise, but there's a lot that can be improved. My friend & I were confused on what a lot of the mechanics were/did. While we were able to figure most of the core mechanics, the game could definitely benefit from more tooltips & more detailed descriptions, particularly around Guardian Usage & the Revive system.

We didn't feel particularly compelled by the story & it sometimes felt like things were added haphazardly:

- Starting Point & Training Grounds w/ the dummy enemies felt empty & unnecessary. A proper forced tutorial, I feel, would enhance the experience a lot. As it stands, we basically enter the game into a "dead", empty area. Get us straight into the action!

- Fighting felt "flighty". We skated around the map, which isn't a bad thing... but, there's no weight to attacks to make fighting feel satisying. 

- Please give us the manual ability to decide WHEN to revive. So many times, my friend revived me AS AN ENEMY attacked above my body & would instant kill me.

- Ambient noise was nice & Boss music was a BANGER! However, I didn't feel like the sounds matched the tone during regular battle or moving between areas.

- Speaking to NPCs felt tedious & the objectives didn't seem worthwhile: No stakes, no rewards, no new dialogue per cycle & since we weren't already invested in the story, it felt like just another extra step.

- The game was pretty unforgiving (in a frustrating way) because of the lack of worthwhile items or heals. There's a lot of terrain to work through & destroy. Even if temporary boosters or healing items were 5% drops from terrain/enemies, that'd feel better for morale than nothing at all & wouldn't affect our desire to utilize Merchant/Guardians.

- Wormi is AMAZING. The Guardian System was pretty fun once we "figured" it out. I say it with quotes because a lot of it was guesswork. I do think this feature should be fleshed out/buffed.

For our initial reaction to the game, you can find the VOD here. You'll have to forgive me, as I played the game during a 24hr Charity Stream. Timestamps are available, though:

• Youtube Timestamped Link | 2nd Attempt - Read Notes.
• Graphics :
  • Some of it is fine or good, while others are completely different and amateurish. 
    • Was an asset pack used and some art is a fill-in for what wasn't in the pack, or are some old art and are being slowly replaced?
    • A good example is the little silk-worm buddy , the art he gets in the bottom left is well-done and cute, but once spawned in it looks like it's from an early 2010s flash game.
• Music / Sfx :
  • Music : Most of it is fairly meh , the 'camp' area's song is nice though.
  • SFX : Completely lacking in this regard on nearly everything, nothing sound 'punchy' , attacks sound wimpy , 
• GUI : Good.
• Gameplay : It's fine, it's functional but needs some fine tuning to be fun. Things are generally extremely easy, then suddenly you get hit for 1/3rd of your hp.
• Notes :
  • The demo got stuck at 100% loading and never went anywhere , I had to install the steam version which ended up working.
  • I liked the eyestalk boss design
  • If you're doing solo and not co-op, the menu should pause the game, I got killed while trying to lower music volume!
  • Seeing the giant weapon in front of our strange little 'umi' is a bit weird, maybe an option to scale it down at the least?
  • Trying to manually aim while Auto-aim is on should allowed you to override it, as it is, I missed a few shots that I could've hit otherwise, this is greatly annoying.

Overall I must say I didn't particularly enjoy this, I think it needs some tweaks and more time to cook, but with what's here I think the potential for a good game is there and is nearly actualized.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 8! My name's Hythrain, a co-host and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!

So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.

So I'll be upfront: I don't feel like there's any sort of feedback I can provide you. The visuals are great, sound design is spot on, and the primary game loop feels fun. I could see myself losing track of time just playing this over and over.

The one thing I did think should be changed is how fast text is taken off the screen, like in the beginning. As a streamer, I like to do dramatic readings of text for my viewers and it can be challenging to do that when the dialogue goes off faster than I can speak the words. I also felt this way when I'd get the maps with that one fellow who'd give you your boon first and then have the enemies attack, as every time my Guardian would get an upgrade and would prevent me from reading whatever he said when he left. I'm big on story, so I like even the insignificant bits of story.

Edit: I completely forgot something! When I downloaded this game, I was left utterly shocked when I extracted it from the ZIP file to find the extracted size was nearly over 9 times as large! How the hell did you do that?! I've NEVER seen compression on that level and I want to know your secrets!

The updated version is on the steam demo page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3729470/Umigame_Demo/